


Almost Like Absolution

by Tedronai



Category: Coldfire Trilogy - C. S. Friedman
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 06:01:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13047978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tedronai/pseuds/Tedronai
Summary: Damien Vryce makes his living as a demon slayer and drinks his loneliness away in a new world that wasn't made for the likes of him. At least, until somebody he could almost swear he knows walks in and changes everything... again.





	Almost Like Absolution

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Winoniel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winoniel/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide~!
> 
> Now, I know the ending of the books divides opinions dramatically, but you didn't say anything about hating it so... I hope this is alright! I kind of realised too late that all my other ideas would have required me to brush up on the canon and my books are in storage for another month or so because I'm between apartments. A bit awkward, but hey, now that your prompt made me return to the fandom again, I'm sure to reread the books when I have them at hand again and probably write more!

Damien Vryce wakes up with a dull, pounding headache and swears he’s never drinking again. Even as the words cross his mind, he knows he’s fooling himself; he doesn’t have much else to occupy his time those evenings he’s free. He’ll drink again, and he’ll wake up hungover again, and the cycle will repeat like the only certain thing in this mad new world. There’s certain bleak sort of comfort in that.

He washes up and gets dressed before wandering down to the common room. He’s been staying in the village for almost a week and everybody frequenting the one inn knows him by sight though fewer than a handful have successfully engaged him in conversation. He’s the monster hunter, the disgraced priest, and he hasn’t got the foggiest idea how they know the latter part but it’s something he can’t shake. Half the people regard him with contempt mixed with pity, the other half seem to think he’s some kind of a romantic hero, and he doesn’t know which he hates more.

He grabs a bite of breakfast and heads out. There are still demons lurking in the woods, and as long as there are, he’s got his work cut out for him.

  
  


Afterwards he’d like to say that he knew something was going to be different the moment he walked back into the inn that evening, but that would be a lie. He sits in his corner table alone with his dinner like any other night, wrapped in the cloak of moody silence that keeps most curious souls from approaching him, and his forbidding glare drives away the rest. So it’s something of a surprise when he hears footsteps approach and stop by his table, hears the scrape against the floor as the intruder pulls up a chair for themselves.

“Bugger off,” Damien mutters into his pint.

“Now now, Vryce,” a cool voice says, soft but with a hint of underlying steel. “Is that a way to greet a potential employer?” 

The voice itself isn’t familiar, but something about the cadence, the intonation, makes Damien freeze and his heart skip a beat before picking up again at double speed. He looks up and for a moment he has trouble focusing his eyes on the young man sitting across the table with a wine glass held daintily in one hand. He tries to speak but his mouth is suddenly dry; he reaches for his drink with a shaking hand and gulps down a sloppy mouthful of ale. When he sets the mug down again, the clink against the surface of the table sounds too loud, jarring.

“Employer?” he manages to get the word out with great effort.

Narrow shoulders twitch slightly in a minuscule shrug. “You kill demons. I study them… and I can pay you better than the peasants of this village.”

“You study demons,” Damien repeats dully, fighting the urge to laugh. “Sure, whatever. I’ll kill some demons for you. Where do you want me to start?”

Dark eyes study him intently, the emotion in them unreadable yet heart-wrenchingly familiar though the colour and shape are all wrong. “You can start by getting a good night’s sleep,” the youth replies smoothly. “We’ll leave the first thing in the morning, and I want you awake and functional by dawn.”

Damien can’t help laughing at that, a harsh sound that earns him a look he can only describe as ‘unimpressed’. “Dawn it is, then.” He watches the youth get up without another word, finishes his dinner and heads upstairs to his room. For the first time in months he doesn’t feel like drinking.

  
  


In the morning, the young man is waiting for Damien by the stables. Damien watches him for a moment in silence, taking in the details that his half-drunken mind had refused to acknowledge the evening prior. Too short, too slight, too dark, too young… yet the way he stands, the way he carries himself, it’s all familiar, too familiar and Damien feels the shards of his broken heart grind together painfully.  _ Why now? _ he wants to ask;  _ Why risk it at all? _ But of course he can’t ever bring that subject up. He doesn’t fully know the terms of the deal that seems to have given the young man before him another chance at life, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to be the one to jeopardise that deal.

The young man finally notices him -- or acknowledges his presence -- and they set off, their mounts already prepared for them.

  
  


They fight their first demon of the journey before they stop for lunch. It feels a little like a freak coincidence; the demons that are left in these parts don’t usually venture this close to the main roads in broad daylight. Damien hasn’t found one this close to a human settlement in a long time.

It looks like a furry beast, only larger than any naturally occurring beast Damien has ever heard of. That makes fighting it a little tricky; the reach of its clawed paws is longer than that of Damien’s sword arm, but Damien has experience of facing against unlikely odds and honestly, this poor thing is hardly the worst he’s had to deal with. He prevails with nothing but a couple of minor scratches to show for it while his ‘employer’ watches from the sidelines.

Afterwards, Damien watches the youth cut the carcass open with clinical precision. “You’re really studying them,” he says, suddenly feeling the need to fill the silence with human voices.

The comment earns him a distracted frown. “Why would I lie about that?”

_ Why, indeed. _ Damien has no answer to that, and so he just turns away and goes to see to their mounts. He returns after a few minutes. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

The dark eyes flicker briefly towards him, immaculately shaped eyebrows arching for a second. “If you insist.”

  
  


When they make camp for the night, Damien finally musters up the nerve to ask, “What should I call you?”

For the first time he thinks he can see his companion’s perfect composure falter a little. It’s nothing as obvious as an involuntary intake of breath or a startled look or a nervous twitch, just… something about the way the silence lasts perhaps a heartbeat longer than it should have. “That’s an odd way of phrasing it,” the young man says in lieu of answering.

Damien shrugs, poking at the fire with a stick. He watches sparks fly up towards the night sky before fading into nothingness. “If you wanted me to know your real name,” he says at length, “you’d have introduced yourself when you hired me. That’s fine, I don’t need to know your name. But I’ve got to call you  _ something _ .”

The thin smile that curves the other man’s lips is heartbreaking for all the wrong reasons. “Isaiah Hunt,” he replies. “My name is Isaiah Hunt.”

Damien stares, torn between laughing and cussing out loud, though in the end he does neither. “A pleasure, Mr. Hunt,” is all he manages to say with a straight face and so he leaves it at that.

  
  


Over the next few days they travel further away from civilisation. Damien asks no questions, either about their destination or his employer’s personal motivations. The longer he’s sober, the more he begins to feel like his old self… and the more he remembers why he took to drinking in the first place. This brave new world is no place for him. He begins to wish anew that he’d died with the world he knew.

When such thoughts begin to surface, ‘Isaiah’ always seems to sense it somehow; either that or he just chooses to pick up conversation with such uncanny timing that Damien doesn’t buy it for a second.  _ You know me too well, damn you, _ he thinks with a note of hysteria.  _ Why do you still know me so well when I don’t know a damn thing about you? _

He doesn’t ask that out loud.

  
  


The pack of wolf-like demons takes them unawares as they’re looking for a place to camp for the night. Damien fights most of them off while Isaiah struggles to keep their panicked mounts from bolting. The gunshot that takes down one of the creatures leaping at Damien from behind takes the former priest by surprise and his focus breaks just enough that he comes out of the fight bleeding.

“You could have warned me,” he notes sourly as he sits by the campfire, stripped down to his waist and trying to inspect the ragged cut in his left side. Twisting his torso like that hurts, making him hiss sharply.

“I thought it better to act first and talk then,” the other man says smoothly. He looks for something in his saddlebags, then crouches next to Damien. “Let me see… This needs to be cleaned and stitched up.” There’s a note of wry amusement in his voice. “Lucky for you, I’m not squeamish. Sit still.”

Damien obeys. Isaiah’s delicate hands are steady and professional as he works on dressing the wound; steady and gentle in a way that throws Damien off for some reason. When the work is done and the other man hands him a flask of brandy, Damien takes it, grateful for the liquor and not only because of the pain. The desire that he feels isn’t the same kind of yearning for the numbness of alcohol that drove him to drink before; this is a feeling he’s afraid to examine too closely and the memory of Isaiah’s hands on his skin isn’t helping.

  
  


Isaiah doesn’t let him drink a lot but the liquor is potent enough that his dreams are troubled that night. Or maybe it’s not the liquor at all, maybe it’s something else that’s making him dream about Tarrant after all this time, and that’s not an option he wants to think about too closely, either. All he knows is that when he wakes, Isaiah is already up and has a kettle boiling over the campfire.

“You talk in your sleep,” the other man notes in a conversational tone.

“I’m fine,” Damien replies automatically before the words fully register. When they do, he nearly drops the cup he’s just filled with hot tea. He manages to set it down without adding burns to his list of injuries, then looks over the fire to Isaiah. “I… wasn’t aware,” he mutters.

Dark eyes regard him with something almost like amusement. “Now you are.” A moment’s silence. When it becomes evident that Damien isn’t going to speak, Isaiah continues, “You’re not going to ask what I heard?”

Damien makes himself shrug as though the question isn’t relevant. “Something embarrassing no doubt, or you wouldn’t go on about it like that.”

The other man laughs softly. “No doubt.” Then the laughter dies, leaving behind something almost hesitant. “You lost somebody,” he says, dark eyes glittering as he watches Damien for a reaction. “Somebody who meant a great deal to you.”

“So what if I did?” Damien replies, more harshly than he intended but he’s not apologising. “What’s it to you?” For a moment he’s nearly overcome by an absurd urge to just come out and say it;  _ I know who you are, and you must know I know, why do we keep doing this? Why are  _ you _ doing this? _ ...But he doesn’t. This isn’t what he wants, this isn’t the way he wants it, but he can’t bear the thought of losing  _ him _ again.

Isaiah seems unfazed by the outburst. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, as though it’s the most natural thing in the universe.

Damien isn’t sure if the ragged gust of breath that escapes him is closer to a laugh or a sob. “No,” he says. “Yes. I don’t know.” He draws a deep breath and runs a hand over his face. “Whatever.” The other man simply waits in silence. Damien shifts slightly, seeking a more comfortable position… and then he begins to speak. “I had a… friend, I suppose you could say we were friends. We should have been enemies, but we… we both changed.” He can hear the desolate grief in his own voice when he adds, “I think we destroyed each other.”

  
  


He talks for hours while Isaiah listens, mostly in silence.  _ I bet you’re enjoying this, _ Damien thinks darkly at some point;  _ I bet it’s stroking your ego just right to hear me wax poetic about Gerald bloody Tarrant like this. _ But there’s no hint of a self-satisfied smirk on the other man’s face, and Damien isn’t sure he could stop now that he’s started, anyway, so he lets the words come.

Neither of them brings up the topic of continuing the journey that day. Once Damien has talked himself hoarse, Isaiah simply changes the bandages on his wound and tells him to rest. Feeling exhausted and raw from the emotionally fraught conversation, Damien doesn’t protest.   
  


 

He wakes up disoriented and confused, only to find Isaiah still sitting by the fire. At first he feels embarrassed to remember all the things he said, but then he figures it’s too late for something as quaint as embarrassment. They’ve already shared a far more intimate connection, or he shared one with Tarrant; Isaiah knows him better than anyone alive. There’s really no place for embarrassment here.

“Why did you choose that name?” something makes him ask.

Dark eyes fix him with a stare that would make most men take a step back. Damien can’t do that, seeing as he’s still lying down, so he meets that gaze with all the dignity of a man who’s just woken up. At length, a ghost of a smile twitches the corners of Isaiah’s mouth. “You’re an educated man, Vryce,” he says. “Surely you don’t need me to spell it out.”

Damien snorts softly. “Suppose not.” He sits up slowly, careful of aggravating the wound. It feels significantly better already and he can’t help wondering if it’s simply because it was never as serious as it seemed, or because of Isaiah’s treatment. “Why are you here? And don’t say demons; you could have found demons anywhere, you could have killed them yourself. Why did you find  _ me _ ?”

For a heartbeat it seems like Isaiah is about to deflect, to give a flippant response… and then he decides otherwise. He stares into the fire for a long while, and in that moment he looks so much like Tarrant despite looking nothing like him that Damien has to look away. Then, “I lost somebody, too,” Isaiah says and there’s an odd note to his voice, something Damien can’t quite identify. “Somebody who grew to mean a great deal to me.” Damien looks back at him and their eyes lock in perfect understanding. “I think we destroyed each other.”

“Isaiah,” Damien speaks the name almost like a prayer, and he hasn’t prayed in a very long time, he can barely remember what it feels like…

And then he’s on his feet, rounding the campfire and Isaiah meets him halfway. There’s desperation in the way they reach for each other, hands grasping and fumbling, breaths coming in shallow, erratic gasps as bodies press together; it should be awkward but somehow it isn’t. And when their lips meet, it feels almost like absolution.

**Author's Note:**

> So... it's probably obvious, or at least I hope it is, but yeah the choice of Gerald's new name wasn't completely arbitrary. I mean. He _would_ name himself after a prophet of an Earth religion, wouldn't he? :D


End file.
